


In the Silence of These Rows | 4 Seasons of Klance

by EleanoraWrites



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Autumn, Bisexual Lance (Voltron), Eventual Keith/Lance (Voltron), Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gay Keith (Voltron), High School, Hunk & Lance & Pidge | Katie Holt Friendship, Hunk & Lance (Voltron) Friendship, Keith is the mysterious guy, Keith/Lance (Voltron) Fluff, Keith/Lance (Voltron)-centric, Keith/Lance meet at the library, Klance zine piece, Lance & Pidge | Katie Holt Friendship, Lance (Voltron)-centric, Lance is failing Iverson's classes, Lance is the flirty guy who gets shy, M/M, Mrs. Holt is the librarian, PIDGE KNOWS WHAT'S UP, Pining Keith/Lance (Voltron), Pining Lance (Voltron), Slow Burn Keith/Lance (Voltron), Socially Awkward Keith (Voltron), Soft Keith/Lance (Voltron), Zine piece, oh there's a notebook that connects it all, the library is magical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:15:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27788839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EleanoraWrites/pseuds/EleanoraWrites
Summary: The boy lifts his gaze as if sensing he was being watched and locks eyes with Lance. He holds it there, curious and slightly puzzled, a gentle eyebrow perfectly arched in consideration before he looks away breaking the spell way too soon.Lance feels his cheeks blush, a strange heat swirling inside him and burning his extrovert trait, a slight timidity overcoming him. On any other day he would put on his flirty persona and would daringly introduce himself.But this boy; he's not like any other boy.-----This is my4 Seasons of Klancezine piece featuring artwork by the lovely@/kafeinnopatchion Instagram. It's a high-school!au in which Lance sees this mysterious boy in the library and since then, pins after him.
Relationships: Keith & Lance (Voltron), Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Kudos: 34





	In the Silence of These Rows | 4 Seasons of Klance

**Author's Note:**

> First published on Instagram:  
> • [Part 1](https://www.instagram.com/p/CIF-5MUA5bu/?igshid=vos0ykvgvix)  
> • [Part 2](https://www.instagram.com/p/CIIkWIrgvt4/?igshid=1jtfsaqkab9lc)  
> • [Part 3](https://www.instagram.com/p/CINv2DUgyYB/?igshid=x0ndjsjb09ua)  
> • [Part 3](https://www.instagram.com/p/CAgJwAdA5Zx/?igshid=1l3eupfnmxz0k)

“The _library_?” Lance asks looking up at the stone building and grimacing.

“You wanna pass Iverson's exam, don't you?” Pidge confronts tugging at his sleeve and dragging him up the stairs. “If you fail you can kiss college goodbye.”

“And what about Hunk? Why aren't you lecturing him about studying? He's failing the class just as I am,” Lance counters entering the library and immediately getting scolded by one of the librarians. 

“Because he's currently volunteering to earn extra credits,” Pidge replies in a rushed whisper before reaching a table and forcing Lance to sit. 

Lance exhales exasperatedly, giving Pidge an offended look before forcing himself to actually take his things from his backpack. He's purposely being extra sluggish, taking one item at the time until Pidge huffs, throws her hands in the air and stands up from her chair, mumbling something about having to pick up a book. 

Lance smiles, his goal at annoying her accomplished.

He sighs then and runs a hand through his hair taking in the heavy silence that is supposed to be soothing but instead weighs down heavily on him. The autumnal sun is bright outside the library and it trails in through the windows in prismatic beams, the specks of dust dancing in the air like ballerinas made of tiny points of light.

He follows a particular ray of light, seeing it shine bright until his eyes fall on a table near one of the tall windows. For some unknown reason, his heart skips an exponential beat as he looks at the boy concentrated on his book.

Black hair, pale skin, dark eyes and a peculiar sense of fashion, definitely a combination that normally wouldn't spike Lance's interest but somehow, with this boy, it just pulls him in. There's something about him, something alluring about the way he purses his lips in focus that makes Lance's stomach churn faintly.

The boy lifts his gaze as if sensing he was being watched and locks eyes with Lance. He holds it there, curious and slightly puzzled, a gentle eyebrow perfectly arched in consideration before he looks away breaking the spell way too soon.

Lance feels his cheeks blush, a strange heat swirling inside him and burning his extrovert trait, a slight timidity overcoming him. On any other day he would put on his flirty persona and would daringly introduce himself. 

But this boy; he's not like any other boy.

"Hmph!"

Pidge returns with a massive volume in her arms, the book almost too big for her petite figure and the moment is shattered into pieces. She lets it fall on the table with a low and muffled thump and takes her glasses to clean them on her shirt.

"Thought you'd be gone by now," she comments squinting at Lance. "Thought you'd use the opportunity to just sneak away. I'm surprised you actually stayed."

"What are you saying? Of course I stayed," Lance retorts a little too loud, giggling embarrassingly as he scratches the back of his neck. 

Lance steals a quick glance at the boy and feels disappointed when he notices he's not there anymore, his place empty and no sign of him in his immediate surroundings. 

"What is it?" Pidge asks following his gaze as she adjusts her glasses. "Who are you searching for?"

"No-one," Lance replies, snapping his head back to Pidge, heart throbbing like a frantic drum and ringing in his ears. He clears his throat, composing himself as best as he can while Pidge observes him, doubt clear in those big eyes of hers. "Leave me alone Pidge!"

"Yeah, whatever," she says, shrugging her shoulders and opening the book, dust puffing out of its pages.

Lance looks at the table again. That same disappointment crawls inside him and he sighs resignedly, his mood suddenly dampens. 

Who is that boy? 

_I need to know!_

* * *

"What are you doing here?" Pidge asks, startling Lance out of his inner reverie. He closes the book he wasn't paying attention to shut with a loud thud that echoes through the quiet library. He shrinks away from the shushes that whisper around him and glances up at Pidge.

"I'm studying," Lance replies in a low voice, blushing slightly and casting a quick glance at the table, the mysterious boy still focused on whatever he was writing.

Lance almost feels his heart burst out of his chest as a raven lock of hair falls to the stranger's eyes. He reaches his hand up to brush it away, such a lazy and casual gesture that seems almost in slow-motion, as if Lance was watching him from a screen. 

Then, as if pulled by invisible magnetic forces that attracted them together, dark eyes bore into him, curious and interested, a soft crease between his eyebrows. Lance freezes, heart a frantic unmeasured mess that pangs heavily, body shivering. It was almost as if time stood still, the autumnal rain outside the window fractured by the momentum inside the library, all sounds muted but the drum inside Lance's ribcage. 

Then, as if a broken record scratching the needle, time erupts back into normal speed, voices too loud in a library, rain pounding too strong against the windows' panes, unsteadiness too numbing.

The dark haired boy looks away, down at his book and the spelman is broken, leaving Lance hanging and wanting more.

"Hey, Lance?" Pidge snaps her fingers in front of his eyes and Lance shakes his head from the sudden haze that had shrouded his thoughts. "You there dumbass?"

"Don't call me dumbass, gremlin," Lance counters, forcefully taking his eyes from the stranger and focusing on Pidge. She was sitting down in front of him with a knowing and mischievous grin on her face that scared Lance to the core. She was all calculations and deliberations, smugness in the way she picks up her book and leisurely flips through the pages, all while staring back at Lance with that smirk. "What?"

"So you're studying, hum?" she asks, leaning back against her chair and squinting her eyes at him. "Studying what? How to pine after a guy 101?"

"Wha- I wasn't- Shut up Pidge," Lance feels his face, ears and neck all burn at the sudden embarrassment that crawls through him. He purposely ignores Pidge, burying his face behind a random book he'd pick up and not paying attention to any words written there. The urge to glance back at the boy was big but he swallows it by mumbling to himself, biting his bottom while cursing Pidge. He hopes the stranger hadn't heard her, hadn't witnessed the sudden redness of his face.

"Hey, loverboy," Pidge calls again, her finger popping up on top of his book and Lance exhales tiredly. "Your book is upside-down, dumbass."

She turns the book, the words finally making some sense to Lance though he wasn't paying much attention to them and his self-consciousness creeps up like a red flag. He hides further in behind the book, wishing the floor would swallow him whole to end his misery.

He ventures a quick glance. The stranger is standing up from his chair quietly and dressing his leather jacket with such an ease and harsh elegance it was almost hypnotic. He places his bag at his shoulder and leaves, his feet making the wooden floorboards creak under his weight. Lance follows him just until he disappears from sight. His presence, eerie and mysterious as his whole appearance, still lingers heavily in the air and Lance takes a lungful of air to filter that sense of presence in. Leather, wind, rain and thunder, autumnal smells he was accustomed to now brought up the image of that mysterious guy.

"Take a picture, it'll last longer," Pidge teases him with a low and cunning chuckle that enrages Lance slightly. He returns his attention to his table, ready to give Pidge the stink eye when he notices a book on the stranger's table, resting there as if patiently waiting for something. Dá

Lance waits a few minutes; ten, twenty, thirty. No-one reclaims the book and its owner doesn't return for it. Thankfully Pidge had been quiet with her teasing, too concentrated on her computer to pay any attention now to whatever Lance was doing. The sound of her fingers clicking away at the keyboard were low enough not to bother him. Lance looks around the library; only a handful of people remained there, some focused on their work while others seemed ready to have a breakdown. He slides out of his chair, not making a sound in the silent library and casually shrugs his shoulders while pointing at the bookshelves when Pidge raised an eyebrow at him, barely looking at him.

"I'm gonna search for a book," he whispers to her.

Lance crosses the small distance between his table and the lonesome book. He surreptitiously looks around and then grabs it, disappearing behind a bookshelf and hiding in its seclusion. With his heartbeat deafening him, blood pumping in his ears, he looks down at the book. The black hardcover one had the words KK engraved in them. No author, no title. Lance feels like a kid peeking at someone's diary and the giddiness makes him tremble slightly. He carefully opens the cover, staring at a blank page before flipping it.

A name, a blissful name to his mysterious boy: _Keith Kogane._

* * *

"Goddamn it," Lance curses as thunder rumbles, a sheet of fat drops beginning to fall down like a deluge and soaking him. He places his backpack over his head, trying to protect himself from the rain but failing miserably at that. Luckily to him the library loomed before him in all its ancient glory, pinnacles of wisdom lurking behind those grey stone walls.

He never liked the library if he were to be honest. Always thought it was too dark, too dusty and too silent. He preferred the outside, leisurely soaking in the sun while the breeze caressed his hair and the heat kissed his cheeks. But now he views the library differently, like a secret passed down by generations that grips his chest in a funny way.

Shaking the droplets from his shoulders, he enters the library with quiet squeaking footsteps. It's a bit more crowded than usual but that could be due to the continuous rain. The autumn weather has been unrelenting, almost unforgiving as it pours down on them with crispy showers and foggy mornings. And as the warmth from the inside slowly sips through his skin, Lance feels his heart drop down in disappointment as he looks at the table and there's no sign of Keith.

There's no point in him leaving since it was still raining. So he sighs sadly and wanders through the endless rows of bookshelves, pretending to be reading the spines while, in fact, he sulks away at missing Keith. He questions his own sanity at crushing over a stranger he doesn't even know. He only knows his name and oftentimes he wonders if his name is really Keith. That notebook could belong to someone else and he might've borrowed it.

Lance had been so determined to approach him, to strike up conversation and, who knows, probably ask him for some coffee. But now his determination dampened and a sense of forlorn engulfs him.

He sighs again and turns the corner of a bookshelf. Suddenly the floor is taken from under his feet, gravity pulls him down and he smacks down on the floor with a quiet thud that knocks the air out of his lungs.

" _Hmph_ ," he wheezes out as his vision blackens slightly at the corners.

"Hey! Watch where you're going," a voice says annoyed and the sound of shuffling abruptly stops the ringing in Lance's ears. 

He uses his elbows to lift himself up and feels a small bubble of embarrassment laced with a tiny bit of annoyance crawling over his bruised ego. "Excuse me?"

He manages to stand up on his own and fills his lungs before turning around to face whoever made him fall down in such an embarrassing way. He almost chokes as the ugly name he was about to call out dies on his lips and a heavy skip of his heartbeat makes his cheeks burn a different tinge of red.

_Keith!_

Keith is shoving his books inside his backpack, black bangs covering a pair of indigo eyes that seem fuming. 

"I-," Lance starts, suddenly too shy and hesitant to even consider calling Keith out for making him fall down. Instead he notices that Keith had been sitting there for a while. "Why are you on the floor?"

"Because this is a nice and quiet place," Keith starts, finally standing up and placing his bag on his shoulder, shaking his head to brush his hair from his face. "And you're too loud and you distract me while I work."

"I distract you?" Lance asks back indignantly. "Wait… I'm loud?"

"Yeah!" Keith replies while rolling his eyes. He points at Lance, finger digging at his chest and all Lance can do is stare wide eyed at Keith, perhaps a little too self-conscious that Keith recognises him. "You and your friend. I can never concentrate when you two are around."

Something rubs Lance off and his previous embarrassment, and his pining after Keith, melt away into his usual self defence manner that kicks in whenever Lance feels his temper begin to boil.

"Oh, excuse me for ruining your study with _my study_."

"So that's what you were doing?" 

"Of course that's what I was doing. This is a library, what else should I be doing here?"

"I don't know, training for the next blabbermouth tournament?"

"Silence!" someone says behind them and both turn to see the librarian crossing her arms angrily while glaring at them, her haughty and cold demeanour making Lance swallow hard. "Do I have to kick you both out of the library, gentlemen?"

"Sorry," they almost say in unison.

She humphs and turns to leave, her feet clicking at the wooden floor as she walks away..

"Great!" Keith murmurs almost under his breath as he throws his head back and Lance glances at him, puzzled. "I almost got kicked out of the only place in this highschool I like to be because of you."

"Because of me?" Lance asks once again indignantly, his tone barely above a whisper. 

"I'm gonna be on Mrs. Holt's black list now," Keith continues as if Lance hadn't said anything. "I knew you were trouble when I first saw you.

Lance inhales loudly though he isn't sure why. There are two feelings coursing through him; the way Keith has said that feels both dangerously teasing and annoyingly infuriating. He can't decode it, can't enunciate the true intent behind Keith's words.

"Whatever dude," he says instead while turning on his heels and preparing to leave. 

"Try not to stump me next time," Keith retorts to his backs, once again those two feelings mingling together and messing up Lance's emotions. 

He can hear Keith's footsteps begin to retreat further into the library and his mind suddenly overlaps whatever sense of decency he possesses.

He stops. Maybe it was the short intake of breath he caught or some kind of malfunction in his system that overrides his discernment, but he stops on his tracks despite Keith's constant bickering and silently inhales, filling his lungs with that dusty smell of knowledge that accompanies the thousands of books surrounding them in such cathedral.

He shuffles through his backpack, still slightly damped from the rain and recovers the hardcover, the two golden K catching the feeble light from a nearby lamp, the cursive lettering beginning to fade like a ghost belonging to the library.

"Hey, Keith," he calls calmly and is rewarded by Keith's abrupt halt and his slow turn of the head to look over his shoulder back at Lance.

"You know my name?" Keith's surprise is clear in not only his voice but also in the way he knits his eyebrows together. 

"Yeah, I have your notebook," Lance explains while waving the notebook in front of him. There's a little "oh" coming from Keith, like a silent revelation that illuminates the redness on his cheeks. "How about you buy me some coffee and I'll return it to you then?"

Keith's body turns all the way towards Lance, his leather jacket creaking a little with the movements, once again so fluid and effortless. Lance has too will himself to remain calm, almost nonchalant as he gives Keith a mischievous lopsided grin.

And to his shock, one that has red alerts ringing wildly inside him, Keith returns the smirk with a knowing glance that should be forbidden, witnessed only by Lance's pounding heart and the unknown characters of the books that watch the scene unfold like silent readers.

"It's a date," he answers with a wink and without another word, he leaves a perplexed and blushing Lance staring back at his retreating self. 

Lance is almost sure Mrs. Holt will soon come to smack his head at the loud sound of his beating heart. There's a tingling sensation numbing him, a haze of drunkenness that Lance never felt before and his euphoria eclipses all his previous judgments about Keith's bickering.

* * *

Autumn is the most majestic season of the year. The golden and rusty colours contrast gravely with the sweet smell of pumpkin that lingers in the air as the breeze perpetually blows the clouds in the canvas of the sky. It's the perfect time to brush away the reminiscences of the past and start anew, a brand new start with the change of the leaves.

And with autumn that passes by, the story since Lance and Keith's first date is told differently but each time with the same old feeling of fulfilment. They often change how it went, adding a new flare and new vibe to it but never changing how in the end they ended up together.

And now, fourteen years after that bump in the library, four years after their first date, Lance stares through the window to the pouring autumnal rain outside the library and sighs, contentedly. In his hands the hardcover notebook with the initials LM imprinted in gold waits for his next words. A gift from Keith on their first anniversary.

"The library?" comes a voice, a familiar one that makes Lance's stomach spurt on a dance of butterflies' wings as it always does. He turns slowly, lips curling into a smirk as he takes in the figure of his boyfriend. "Really?"

"Brings back good memories, doesn't it?" Lance asks smugly as Keith leans down to give him the briefest of pecks on the corner of his lips. He can see the smile on his boyfriend's face, the soft blush that adorns his cheeks and the way his eyes shine with the memory.

"Yeah, it does," Keith sits down next to him, the chair scraping at the floor lightly. He makes a face that soon smoothes when he finally sits. "But why the library?"

"This is where I first saw you, right on this spot," Lance starts pointing at where they're sitting, the splatter of rain against the window a melody filling the quietness of the library. "I was over there with Pidge and when I looked up, there you were."

"I remember," Keith murmurs, eyes distant in his own memories. He snorts lightly before focusing back on Lance. "I felt observed. Didn't know it was you staring so intently back at me. It was a little uncomfortable."

"Well, you shouldn't be so damn cute then," Lance retorts and Keith chuckles lightly. "Will you tell me now?"

"Tell you what?" Keith's question doesn't match his knowing smirk, the way the corner of his lips curl up as he looks under his lashes at him. 

"Did you leave your notebook on purpose?" Lance asks through a long-suffering sigh that ends on a plea. They've been in this dance ever since their first date. 

Keith doesn't reply. Instead he takes out of his bag the same hardcover notebook he insists on reusing. It's all worn out, the two golden K losing their shine and though Lance had tried to get a new one, Keith doesn't let him. He flips through the pages until he reaches a new one and starts writing, always with a smirk on his lips.

"So, are you ready for your next exam to finally become a pilot?" Keith asks Lance and sits down straight on his chair, ready to fire his questions at him as they've been doing for weeks now in preparation for Lance's upcoming piloting tests.

And as the hours go by with the autumnal rain washing away the remaining heat of the summer, they stay together once again inside the stone building that started it all fourteen years ago.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading 🤗
> 
> If you liked this fic, please leave some kudos and/or a comment. I'll be eternally grateful.
> 
> If you wish to read more of my content, follow my [Instagram](https://instagram.com/eleanoramckogane?utm_source=ig_profile_share&igshid=1m70cqnbtk7sg) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/kogane_mc?s=09) (please, only follow me on Twitter if you're **+18** ) to keep up to date with all brand new content 💜
> 
> _Xoxo Ellie_


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